Last week I came across Libby Sartain’s blog entitled “Looking Forward to 2010” and was encouraged by what I read – that Workforce Planning is one of the greatest opportunities for organizations moving into 2010. Specifically, Ms. Sartain calls out the importance of measuring how talent moves through an organization, both laterally as well as hierarchically, to understand where potential risks lie.
Companies have a wealth of knowledge at their disposal when developing a workforce plan , not solely limited to terminations and retirements. Ms. Sartain rightly calls out that leveraging survey data to measure employee engagement may be a great indicator of an impending dip in supply, and pairing that with performance data, organizations can start to measure which critical job roles are at the highest risk.
By nurturing a better understanding of internal talent movement, organizations can start to create a more standard development of critical job roles. This, in turn, helps save companies money – both by eliminating bottlenecks of high performers who eventually leave and by limiting a company’s reliance on pricey external hires. It’s important to see workforce planning not as an HR exercise, but as a business exercise aimed at keeping talent and managing the overall cost of the workforce. By making the leap from headcount, to talent, to financial outcomes, organizations can now quantify the impact of their workforce forecasts moving into 2010.